


Dirty Little Southside Secret

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [19]
Category: How to Get Away with Murder, Shameless (US)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Fuckbuddies to Actual Friends Arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:27:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26736607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Michaela Pratt runs into Lip Gallagher the summer after her first year of law school. The people they pretend to be have nothing in common. The people they are: do. (Written for an unlikely pairings challenge back in 2014.)
Relationships: Michaela Pratt/Lip Gallagher
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Dirty Little Southside Secret

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2014, so it's not compatible with the later seasons of either show. Let's just say it takes place in some hypothetical alternate universe limbo after Season 4 of Shameless and Season 1 of HTGAWM, hmm?

After Michaela finishes her first year of law school, she gets a summer internship in Chicago. The law firm is not as prestigious as she could have wished for, but it will do, and it’s actually a paid gig, it pays enough to let her rent a small flat while she works there. What’s more, it gets her out of Philadelphia, and she really really needs to get out for a while.

She spends her first week there proving her worth to her new employers by doing mindless busywork late into the night without complaining, and by Friday evening, she’s dead on her feet. One of her dozens of professional and semi-professional mailing lists alerts her to an event held by a Chicago University law society of sort, and she decides to swing by. Thinking it might be fun, or even provide some good networking opportunities, she gets into her best, most professional-yet-sexy dress. But she needn’t have bothered. When she gets there, it’s just some shitty party where pimply undergraduates celebrate scraping through their school year, and Michaela feels overdressed and out of place and old. She also feels that she needs a drink or ten. She is only halfway through her first drink when she spots the only interesting thing about this sad excuse for a party, the guy selling weed. A youngish white guy with curly hair keeps darting through the crowd, talking to each group of people for a few minutes then moving on, round and round in a smooth and inconspicuous circuit, draping an arm over someone’s shoulders, patting someone else’s back as money and joints change places with well-oiled efficiency. He looks handsome in a scruffy sort of way, only a few years younger than her, and she suddenly thinks – why not? She’s not afraid of bad guys, she knows her way around bad guys, it’s only good guys she has trouble with. Also, after the week she’s had, she seriously considered getting drunk, and as far as bad ideas go, this is way better.

So she walks up to him and feels vaguely pleased when he doesn’t even pretend not to look her up and down. The first thing she says to him is an exact calculation of the time he would spend in prison if she reported him. The first thing he says to her is that he has a prior conviction, so it would be more. He tells her how much more, and she is surprised to find that his numbers check out. Twenty minutes later they are back in her tiny rented flat, having sex with half their clothes still on, her high heels digging into the small of his back. They fuck two more times that night – it’s not even because the sex is that good, it’s just that Michaela doesn’t remember it ever being so much _fun_. Later, half asleep, she wonders whether this was a better idea than getting drunk, and concludes that she'll only be able to judge from how bad she feels the morning after.

When she wakes up, it is already morning, and he is still there – he is sitting cross-legged on the kitchen counter, drinking her coffee, reading a book – an incredibly complex-looking textbook on robotics. He hears her get up, sees her baffled expression, and waves a hand at the book. ‘Summer project,’ he says. ‘I got to get top marks, otherwise they hand my funding over to some other sad charity case.’ She did not expect him to be a college student, hell, she did not expect him to have finished high school. She does not know what to think, how to feel about that, she is not sure why she scrawls her number on his hand before throwing him out. (At first she tried to write it in his textbook but he snatched it away, yelling ‘hey, resale value!’)

Nothing happens that day, but next Monday in the office she gets a text. She’s certain that it’s going to be a dick pic, and she’s half right – it’s a photo of a half-disassembled robot with some blueprints in the background and the guy’s dick in the foreground. She has to stifle a giggle. 

She ends up calling him again – she’s working her ass off, she’s lonely, and she feels like she deserves to just switch off for a few hours. And with him, she can do just that, switch off. She doesn’t have to try hard, not with him. He’s in no place to make demands, and she’s in no hurry to impress him, it seems rude to say it but she knows she’s way out of his league. When they aren’t fucking, they talk, but even talking feels like switching off, easy and natural. It turns out that his name is Lip, that he goes to Chicago Polytechnic, that he’s kind of an asshole and that he has a burning rageful passion for gaming the system, for taking it for all it’s got. Some of it feels familiar to her. She thinks he would have frightened the girl she had been two or three years ago – the girl who hadn’t yet figured out how to hide her accent, how to find clothes that make her look like she doesn’t have to think about what she buys, how to affect the demeanour of effortless power. He would have been frightening, because he is raw and cagey and still so naïve, still in the process of figuring out all the things that she’s moved beyond. It hurts a little, to see him try so hard.

She sleeps with him again, and then again. One night they are already horizontal and half-naked when his phone pings and he rolls off her to read the text message. Before she can protest, he is up, dialling a number while striding across the room and shutting the bathroom door after himself. He comes out ten minutes later, and she demands an explanation, and it better be good. He shrugs and says ‘It was my little sister. The good news is that my bipolar brother didn’t actually go off his meds, he just pretended to go off his meds to scare our father into telling us where he keeps his emergency morphine, which we are going to sell. The bad news is that my brother’s boyfriend’s wife freaked out, which is understandable after what happened last time, and she locked herself and the baby into my other brother’s room. You know how it is.’ And she knows he meant the last sentence as a joke, an absurd self-deprecating little jab, but she can’t help nodding, saying ‘yes’, yes, she does know how it is.

They have sex, they talk. He treats her with an uneasy mix of phony politeness and even phonier insolence, he occasionally calls her ‘princess’, but eventually she is forced to admit that he really listens to what she says. He pumps her for advice about essay structures and job interviews and making a suit look ten times more expensive than it is, because he’s been brought up not to waste resources and she’s nothing if not a good source of information. She tells him his smoking is disgusting and his mouth tastes like an ashtray, she makes a big show of scoffing condescension because she knows he’s had worse, that he likes having to prove himself, he likes silencing the critics. Sometimes, she lets him talk about robotics, not because she’s particularly interested, but because she needs to hear about something that is not law. They have sex, they talk, sometimes he stays for breakfast, sometimes he gets there early enough for dinner. And she doesn’t know why, but she starts letting her guard down. No, that’s a lie, she knows exactly why. It’s because he is doing what she had done, he is building a face and a voice that belies the household he came from, building a life that might lift him out of the mess that is all he’s known, building a self that he will sell for a lump sum the at the first opportunity. She knows this.

It’s not that she drops her clipped accent around him, it’s just that she pays less attention to it. She doesn’t talk about her past or her family, but when he says something about how much he hated construction work and how he wished he could be hired as a waitress like hot chicks were, she replies without thinking, ‘at least on a construction site you don’t have to put up with handsy drunks in the faint hope of tips.’ It takes her a moment to realize that she hadn’t told any of her friends at law school that she waited tables for years.

But she can tell Lip almost anything – she only has to maintain the façade in front of people who matter, who are relevant. Lip is just a guy, so she can rant and laugh and snark and fuck the exact way she wants. Still, it’s funny that she picked a guy because she thought he would be too dumb to get to her, and managed to land on someone who has a knack for seeing right through her. He does not particularly mind whatever he sees in her, but of course he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t waste his energy on trying determine which one is the real her, the act or the actor, the surface or the depth, because he knows you are both who you were made by your circumstances and who you had become to escape them. 

He has gotten under her skin, but she doesn’t know how badly until one night, after sex, she tentatively says ‘what would you do if I told you I did something really horrible?’ He says, in a sleepy voice, ‘what, did you kill a dude?’, and she hides her face in his neck and chokes out ‘kind of.’ He strokes her shoulder, doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t tell him anything else, she’s not an idiot, but even that feels like absolution.

They spend most of the summer together. She work insanely hard at her summer associate job, he spends his days in the robotics lab, his nights dealing drugs, and occasionally dealing with his family’s unhinged shenanigans. The two of them never go on a date, it seems absurd to take what they have and put it in a restaurant or a movie theatre, especially since she has a good idea how little he could afford. Mostly they just stay in Michaela’s room, but when they are going in the same direction they walk together, and sometimes they get food on the way. When they get takeout it’s always her that pays, he doesn’t offer, and she’s glad that they don’t have to talk about money, because they both know it matters. She meets most of his family, largely by accident, and is more entertained than frightened. She knows this is stupid, that she is a tourist in his life, that she is entertaining a false nostalgia for the hardships of her own teenage years, but that’s not the whole truth. She is with Lip, and Lip wants out, and she has already gotten most of the way out. It doesn’t feel like her condescending to him, it doesn’t feel like him using her, instead it feels like a furtive comparing of notes, it feels like having a secret comrade in her unending unrelenting fight with a world that won’t give her what she wants until she takes it by force.

When the summer is over and she has to go back to Philadelphia, she feels oddly disappointed. She had always known that this would be a one-summer thing, she never even expected it to last more than a day, a week. And yet she is reluctant to leave him. Not that she wanted them to be boyfriend and girlfriend, not that she wanted commitment or serious or forever, she remembers the last time she tried that, and how it got royally fucked up. But she knows she does want him in her life. They have sex at her place, with her suitcases already packed, they say goodbye, he doesn’t see her off at the airport.

She still has his number, she suspects he has hers, but she doesn’t really expect him to call. But he does, two weeks into term, twelve hours into her new case with Annalise. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’ she asks, cold, formal, smiling like an idiot.

‘I missed you,’ he says. ‘And uh, I really fucking need a lawyer.’ Michaela is standing on Annalise’s porch with a stack of documents under her arm, she has to read all of them before the meeting with the client, which is in three hours, she had spent most of her night reviewing precedents, it is the beginning of the term and she is already so tired she can feel her heartbeat in her eyeballs and taste caffeine in her sweat, and now her fuckboy from Chicago Polytechnic is on the phone. All right. She can do this. Legal advice first, phone sex later, and then back to work.


End file.
